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Protesting the Protesters

Looking inside Dr. Emilys clinic.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

IN September, Christine Quinn, the City Council speaker, unveiled a bill to address an issue that she believes is too often ignored by New Yorkers. The bill aims to protect the patients and staff of local health clinics that perform abortions from harassment by anti-abortion activists who gather outside the clinics’ doors.

“If you ask a lot of New Yorkers, they would say, ‘This doesn’t go on in our city, in New York,’ ” Ms. Quinn said. “The truth is, it does.”

According to a City Council news release, the bill would allow third parties, including clinic employees, to file charges against protesters. It would also “ease the burden of proof” currently necessary to prosecute those charges. The bill has garnered broad support in the City Council, and it is expected to pass, possibly as early as this week.

In a recent phone conversation, Ms. Quinn said that she herself was unaware of the prevalence of anti-abortion activism in New York until about six months ago, when she began receiving calls from Naral Pro-Choice New York, an abortion-rights group.

According to the group, anti-abortion protesters were singling out a number of clinics in the boroughs outside Manhattan. Among them was Dr. Emily’s Women’s Health Center, a four-year-old clinic at the edge of Hunts Point in the Bronx, which has the highest ratio of abortions to pregnancies of all counties in the state.

For two years, on a strip of pavement outside 560 Southern Boulevard, near 149th Street, protesters and activists who call themselves sidewalk counselors have gathered four times a week — the days the clinic performs abortions — and have handed incoming patients fliers containing graphic pictures of aborted fetuses. Many are volunteers for Expectant Mother Care, a group that operates several centers citywide where women can receive pregnancy tests, counseling and ultrasound readings.

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Chris Slattery, the group’s founder and president, argued that the new Clinic Access bill would “set a new low standard for the protection of First Amendment rights in America.” He also denied that his volunteers harassed patients. “Those of us who do sidewalk counseling, we do it with love and respect for these women,” Mr. Slattery said. “We don’t block their paths. We don’t use hostile body language.”

In September, tensions between the Dr. Emily clinic and its opponents escalated when scores of anti-abortion activists, including friars, nuns and congregants of local churches, descended on the pavement for weeks of protests as part of 40 Days for Life, a nationwide campaign.

On a recent morning, the sidewalk outside the clinic was relatively quiet, but four young sidewalk counselors were handing fliers to passers-by. Among them was Brian Stong, a 21-year-old volunteer for Expectant Mother Care. That morning, Mr. Stong said, he had recorded what he described as his “16th official save.”

Inside, the clinic was bustling. Teenage girls filled the waiting room, some tending to noisy babies in strollers, others staring anxiously past the glass partition separating the waiting room from the nurses’ station. A young woman and man wearing matching black and yellow sneakers sat in a sort of cocoon formation, the woman’s face snuggled into the man’s bulky sweatshirt. By 10 a.m., every one of the room’s 60 chairs had been claimed.